Spatio-temporal envolutional graph neural network for traffic flow prediction in UAV-based urban traffic monitoring system

Abstract

With the advancement of modern UAV technology, UAVs have become integral to creating traffic management monitoring systems. Additionally, UAV-based traffic monitoring systems can predict traffic flow by integrating machine learning methods. Specifically, traffic flow data contains both spatial and temporal information, which can be effectively processed by graph neural networks (GNNs). However, GNNs often face the challenge of oversmoothing, which hinders their ability to capture complex structures in the data. The Spatio-Temporal Graph Ordinary Differential Equations (STGODE) model addresses this issue by introducing Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) to construct deeper GNNs. Despite this, STGODE relies on initially predefined semantic neighborhood matrices, which do not adapt well to the dynamic nature of traffic information. To overcome this limitation, we propose an evolutionary graph neural network for traffic prediction, capable of continuously updating the semantic adjacency matrix throughout the training process. This dynamic evolution of the semantic adjacency matrix allows it to adapt to the features and semantic relations of the current data, enhancing its ability to capture the complexity and variability of traffic patterns. We validate our approach through experiments on several real-world datasets, demonstrating that our method outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks.